I didn't tell him I thought the bells were far from ideal. They didn't have any place to come from, and for the first time I felt a fear of the unknown. Radwick sat there unperturbed trying to fashion some concept, probably of the bells, with his blocks. The earthmen finished servicing and came in to make arrangements for a rendezvous with us some months from then.

"First time out?" the Captain asked me.

"Yessir," I said, trying to look fearless.

He sighed. "Watch out for the Ideals," he said. "The first time's the hardest." His crew stood behind him looking at me like they would look at a condemned man about to take his place in the electric chair.

"Well, all happiness," he said, giving a distasteful glance at the absorbed Radwick.

"All happiness," I managed and they left us alone in space with ringing bells and the red space ship that had the disconcerting habit of sighing once in a while or shifting its wall structure in a stretch that was so human you felt like apologizing for being inside it.

We were out in four light year space. In the big Empty between our solar system and the next. We had passed through two magnetic fields, and already I wasn't the same, but Radwick had laughed.

"Pleasure and pain," he said. "As common as an old shoe on a vacant lot. Why get corked over a little thing like that?"

It helped. It helped a lot to see him twisting and writhing on his bunk, the same as I was, only with the big red encyclopedia on his face as he pretended to read in indifference. We were in the painful magnetic field for about eight hours and I cried and cursed and prayed and laughed in horror and sweated a bucket. The reaction was worse. My frayed nerves temporarily gave out and I tried to walk through the wall of the space ship into the dining room of the Thousand Lights back in New York.

Shortly after that we hit the pleasure field. Those precious moments lasted for the same time as the painful sensations, but after that earth seemed like a cemetery of the dead. I mewed like a stroked kitten and Radwick kept putting down his encyclopedia and laughing in goofy happiness. It was silly; it was wonderful; it made me so glad to have a human body that I wanted to cry.

These magnetic fields were behind us now and I was staring at the outside emptiness apprehensively.

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